Upgrade T110 II Hard Drive space

I have a T110 II with 2x500GB in RAID 1 (S100), so 1TB in total, and I'm running out of disk space. I'm perfectly happy with the machine performance but I would need 4TB, in RAID 0 (mirroring). The machine is running Windows SBS essentials 2011.

I'm a bit reluctant to buy a new server and throw away an old one just because of disk space.

RE: Upgrade T110 II Hard Drive space

The S100 software RAID controller does not support 4 TB hard drives' capacity. The most viable option is to upgrade to the hardware based RAID controller H200 which has support for drives of greater than 2 TB capacity. However, migration of Virtual Disks from software base controllers to hardware based controller e.g; S300 -> H200 is not supported. Therefore, to upgrade to H200 controller, if considered; you will need to backup your data and recreate another VD on the new controller with existing drives.

RE: Upgrade T110 II Hard Drive space

Thank you for your explanations. Would it be easier (I have limited knowledge regarding servers configuration) if I would go for 2TB instead of 4TB? Then, do you think that RAID1 performance on S100 would be acceptable? (We use the server in our small company as Domain Controller + Network File Server).

I mean, with RAID0 file transfer is OK, but I much degradation should I expect with RAID1: more than half speed or less?

RE: Upgrade T110 II Hard Drive space

Yes, you may go for a 2 TB drives because 4 TB drives are not supported on the S100 controller.

Then, do you think that RAID1 performance on S100 would be acceptable? (We use the server in our small company as Domain Controller + Network File Server).

There will be appreciable reduction in read and write performance in RAID 1 due to overhead caused by parity checks and controls for redundancy purposes.

I mean, with RAID0 file transfer is OK, but I much degradation should I expect with RAID 1: more than half speed or less?

I can not for sure provide the quantitative figure by which the performance will be degraded. While you will have good performance with RAID 0, you risk losing your data when you have a failure of a single disk because there is no redundancy of data as provided by RAID 1. Over all, the performance of software based RAID controllers such as S100 is limited by design. For better performance, I would recommend upgrading to hardware based RAID controllers like the H200.